Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) Foreign Languages and English Preparatory School (FLEPS) faculty member Assist. Prof. Dr. Nafia Akdeniz, has been accepted as a Guest Researcher by the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), a research institute operating within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam.
As part of her 3-month research visit scheduled this summer, Assist. Prof. Dr. Akdeniz will conduct ethnographic field studies across the Wereldmuseum network in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam under the supervision of AHM Research Director Prof. Dr. Ihab Saloul.
Focusing on narrative transformation in museum communication, Assist. Prof. Dr. Nafia Akdeniz’s research investigates the ways in which inclusive, decolonial, and post-critical approaches are implemented and conveyed in contemporary museum settings.
Before commencing her fieldwork, Assist. Prof. Dr. Nafia Akdeniz will represent Eastern Mediterranean University at the 12th AHM Conference, Unsettling Heritage and Memory Futures: Decolonial Trajectories Between Crisis and Possibility, where she will present the findings of her postdoctoral research project, “We Are Not Ghosts: Ethnographic Poetry as Transformative Memory Praxis”. Focusing on the role of poetry and artistic interventions as counter-narratives in the communication of memory and heritage, the study provides an important theoretical and methodological foundation for Assist. Prof. Dr. Akdeniz’s new research on narrative transformation in museum communication.
The research is expected to contribute to international discourse on museum communication, cultural memory, and the evolving approaches to narrative transformation in contemporary museums.